No Regrets by Joe Layden Ace Frehley John Ostrosky Page B
Authors: Joe Layden Ace Frehley John Ostrosky
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Spaceman, and that my costume would be adorned with lightning bolts. So it all went together.
As for the notion that KISS was some sort of satanic metal band, with the name an acronym for Knights in Satan’s Service? Complete and utter bullshit. All that satanic crap came out of left field; more precisely, it came out of the southern Bible Belt, where so many of our fans were reared. I remember on some of our early tours, there were religious fanatics outside the shows burning our records, saying we were devil worshippers. Give me a fuckin’ break! I was brought up a Lutheran, Peter was a Catholic, and Gene and Paul were Jews. None of us had ever been involved in any sort of satanic activity.
Period.
The truth is, not only were we not a satanic metal band, but we weren’t really a metal band at all. We were just a melodic hard rock band. Some of our songs were pop, some were heavy rock, bordering on metal, but I never thought of us as a metal band per se. As for the protesters, well, I didn’t pay that much attention to them, but I kind of believed in the old adage “Any publicity is good publicity.”
Really, though, if KISS stood for anything, it was a far more common acronym: Keep It Simple, Stupid. (That saying would end up having a much more profound meaning to me later on in my life.)
Just play the music, play it well, play it loud.
And look good doing it.
KISS COMES TO LIFE
January 30, 1973
By the time we hit the stage for our first performance, at a Queens nightclub called Popcorn, interest in KISS hadn’t exactly built to a thundering crescendo. There might have been more people in the band and crew than in the audience. You try to put experiences like that out of your mind, but it isn’t always easy. My memory suffers sometimes, thanks to all the drinking and drugging, but the brain has a funny way of cataloging events as it damn well pleases. You forget some of the good stuff, and you remember some of the pain. A lot of it, actually.
Of course, even the stuff that hurts can be kind of funny. And to me, in those days, just about everything had its humorous side. So I could stand up there alongside Paul and Gene, the three of us jockeying for space on the stage, unsure how to move or where to position ourselves, and thus sometimes crashing into one another or wrapping our legs around each other until we looked like some multiheaded, hard rock serpent. And I could laugh at the absurdity of it all, even as I looked outover the “crowd” and spotted not a single unfamiliar face. A few of our family members and girlfriends, and that’s about it. A lesser band might have been humiliated to the point of quitting, but we weren’t deterred in the slightest.
We had less than two weeks to prepare for that gig, and I suppose if anyone had captured it on video, and I saw it today, I’d be less than thrilled with our performance. I’m not even sure how we managed to put together a full set in such a short amount of time, but I know that we did. KISS played nothing but original songs that night—a dozen or more tunes that Paul and Gene had already written, and that I’d tried to absorb as quickly as possible. I faked a lot of it, using my natural musicianship to cover gaps, hoping no one would notice. Then again, since the place was practically empty, it wasn’t like there was a lot to lose.
For all my disagreements with Gene over the years, I have to give him credit for being a tireless worker and self-promoter. I never had all that much interest in the financial side of the business; Gene was obsessed with it. From the first time I met him, he seemed like a guy who put as much value on the marketing and promotional end of KISS as he did on the music we produced. Don’t get me wrong. Gene was a decent songwriter and bass player, and I respected him on that level. But it was clear to me that he considered the music to be only one piece of the puzzle. I was like that, too, but to a much lesser degree. I
As for the notion that KISS was some sort of satanic metal band, with the name an acronym for Knights in Satan’s Service? Complete and utter bullshit. All that satanic crap came out of left field; more precisely, it came out of the southern Bible Belt, where so many of our fans were reared. I remember on some of our early tours, there were religious fanatics outside the shows burning our records, saying we were devil worshippers. Give me a fuckin’ break! I was brought up a Lutheran, Peter was a Catholic, and Gene and Paul were Jews. None of us had ever been involved in any sort of satanic activity.
Period.
The truth is, not only were we not a satanic metal band, but we weren’t really a metal band at all. We were just a melodic hard rock band. Some of our songs were pop, some were heavy rock, bordering on metal, but I never thought of us as a metal band per se. As for the protesters, well, I didn’t pay that much attention to them, but I kind of believed in the old adage “Any publicity is good publicity.”
Really, though, if KISS stood for anything, it was a far more common acronym: Keep It Simple, Stupid. (That saying would end up having a much more profound meaning to me later on in my life.)
Just play the music, play it well, play it loud.
And look good doing it.
KISS COMES TO LIFE
January 30, 1973
By the time we hit the stage for our first performance, at a Queens nightclub called Popcorn, interest in KISS hadn’t exactly built to a thundering crescendo. There might have been more people in the band and crew than in the audience. You try to put experiences like that out of your mind, but it isn’t always easy. My memory suffers sometimes, thanks to all the drinking and drugging, but the brain has a funny way of cataloging events as it damn well pleases. You forget some of the good stuff, and you remember some of the pain. A lot of it, actually.
Of course, even the stuff that hurts can be kind of funny. And to me, in those days, just about everything had its humorous side. So I could stand up there alongside Paul and Gene, the three of us jockeying for space on the stage, unsure how to move or where to position ourselves, and thus sometimes crashing into one another or wrapping our legs around each other until we looked like some multiheaded, hard rock serpent. And I could laugh at the absurdity of it all, even as I looked outover the “crowd” and spotted not a single unfamiliar face. A few of our family members and girlfriends, and that’s about it. A lesser band might have been humiliated to the point of quitting, but we weren’t deterred in the slightest.
We had less than two weeks to prepare for that gig, and I suppose if anyone had captured it on video, and I saw it today, I’d be less than thrilled with our performance. I’m not even sure how we managed to put together a full set in such a short amount of time, but I know that we did. KISS played nothing but original songs that night—a dozen or more tunes that Paul and Gene had already written, and that I’d tried to absorb as quickly as possible. I faked a lot of it, using my natural musicianship to cover gaps, hoping no one would notice. Then again, since the place was practically empty, it wasn’t like there was a lot to lose.
For all my disagreements with Gene over the years, I have to give him credit for being a tireless worker and self-promoter. I never had all that much interest in the financial side of the business; Gene was obsessed with it. From the first time I met him, he seemed like a guy who put as much value on the marketing and promotional end of KISS as he did on the music we produced. Don’t get me wrong. Gene was a decent songwriter and bass player, and I respected him on that level. But it was clear to me that he considered the music to be only one piece of the puzzle. I was like that, too, but to a much lesser degree. I
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